Step by step guide: Create your first carbon footprint analysis

Learn how to use Pilario to perform a carbon footprint analysis with this step by step guide.

Pilario can be used to perform LCA or carbon footprint analysis (read more about the differences in our blog article Understanding the Difference Between LCA and Carbon Footprint). Both analysis rely on an underlying model. The Carbon Footprint model is available to every licence and serves as a perfect tool to start utilising Pilario.

In this step-by-step guide, we will be performing a very basic carbon footprint analysis for an example office of seven employees.

Create a new site

We will start our analysis by creating a new Site. Pilario differentiates between assets. Carbon footprint analysis are performed over Sites while LCA are performed over Products.

On the left menu go to Sites and click in the top right corner button, Add site and fill the name you want to give to the site i.e. Brussels Office and the model Carbon Footprint and click on the blue button Add site.

This will bring you to the site page. You can fill other information like description, adding an image, etc. On the left menu, we can define all the variables we want to consider into our analysis. 

Adding energy consumption

We are going to add first the energy consumption of the office. We will only consider two energy sources: electricity and heating. For the electricity, we will include only the electricity used for lighting and electronic devices. For the heating, we will consider only the natural gas.

Follow the steps to add the electricity consumption:

1. On the left menu, click on the ➕ button next to Energy.
2. Click on the item created and click on the title to change the name to Electricity. 
3. Click on the Scope section and define the country. We are using Belgium in this example. Depending on the country selected, the emission factor will change (you can read more about this feature in the article Carbon Footprint model)
4. Click on the Energy section and input the Electricity consumption in kWh. As an average consumption for an office with seven people, in a year, we will input 12600 kWh.
   
   

Follow the steps to add the heating consumption:

1. On the left menu, click on the ➕ button next to Energy.
2. Click on the item created and click on the title to change the name to Heating. 
3. Click on the Energy section and input the Heat, natural gas consumption in kWh. As an average consumption for an office with seven people, in a year, we will input 11000 kWh.

Adding transportation

We are going to add now the employees' commutes to the office. To simplify, we will consider that every employee is making a daily return trip to the office, with an average of 35 km per day, 5 times a week. This gives, approximately, 58000 km. 

Follow the steps to add the employees' cars trips:

1. On the left menu, click on the ➕ button next to Travel.
2. Click on the item created and click on the title to change the name to Employees' commuting. 
3. Under Miscellaneous, select Company vehicles, owned vehicles and employee commuting. 
4. Click on the Private car section and input the distance travelled by car (average) in km.

Calculating the impact

We have finalised inputting all the parameters for our office, and now it is time to see the environmental impact. In Pilario, these results can be seen in the results tab (located in the right, and hidden by default).

Follow the steps to calculate the impact:

1. Open the calculations tab on the right
2. Click on the calculate button 🔄 
3. That's it! Your results should display categorised and as a total.
4. You can see your impact presented in different ways by navigating through the different tabs.

Creating a scenario for comparison

Do not stop there! One of the added values of Pilario is to perform comparative analysis among different products or sites. 

Let's see how we can create a scenario from our office of seven employees. In this example, we will be considering that reducing the desired temperature of the office (from 22°C to 20°C) can have a reduction of 7% in the heating consumption.

Follow this steps to create another office

1. Go to the list of Sites and open the previously created site Brussels Office
2. In the top right corner menu, Actions, click on Create scenario. This will create a new scenario and bring you directly to it.
3. Change the name of the scenario to Brussels Office (thermostat adjustment)
4. Go to the Energy section on the left, select Heating, expand the Energy section and update the Heat, natural gas consumption to 9765 kWh
5. Open the calculations tab on the right and see the comparison via the chart or the graphs.
6. That's it! You can now navigate the tabs in and see the impact of your new policy.

Next steps

As an exercise, we propose to the users that they perform several comparisons by dupplicating their site and tweaking different parameters.

As an example:

1. How would a remote from home policy where workers do not have to commute?
2. How would some isolation works on the building would impact the outcome?